Director Gore Verbinski’s film is at once a throwback to old-timey cowboy movies (“Western” sounds too grand a term for this, as it is best used for movies like “The Searchers”) and a big-budget exercise in overkill.

It’s also nearly two and a half hours long, yet even with that running time can’t really find the tone it wants to establish, going back and forth from deadly serious (and violent) action to comic relief and back again.

On the plus side, there’s Johnny Depp. …

Depp, who worked with Verbinski on the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, plays Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s faithful Native American companion on the old radio serial and television series. The traditional depiction of Tonto as a sort of noble savage would have been impossible today.

Instead, Verbinski, working from a script credited to Justin Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, puts Tonto front and center. An odd framing device has Tonto, in the 1930s, recalling the creation of the Lone Ranger in the Old West for a boy at a fair.

John Reid (Armie Hammer) is a straight-laced, by-the-book law-school graduate who comes back to the small Western town where he grew up. His older brother Dan (James Badge Dale) is a Texas Ranger, married with a son.

But things are in transition. The railroad is about to link the country and change the West forever. Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) is the ambitious railroad man who sees the future and is adamant about chasing it.

As a symbol of law and order taming the region, he’s arranged for the public hanging of Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner), the kind of outlaw who represents the old guard. All that has to happen is for Cavendish to be delivered by railroad to the town for his execution.

Uh-oh.

If you know the Lone Ranger story, you know what happens next. Tragedy leads to the pairing of John Reid and Tonto, as the film dips into mismatched-partner mode. Tonto wants revenge, Reid wants justice. But they both want Cavendish.

This makes more sense in the description than it does on the screen. Several subplots do little but take up time, leading us away from the main narrative. Some of these distractions are meant to be funny, others are surprisingly violent, particularly from a Disney film. Together, they create a jumbled mess.

But from a story standpoint, the weirdest choice was to build the film around Tonto. It’s understandable from a business standpoint: Disney and Verbinski have made a mint off of Depp’s work in the “Pirates” franchise. And even when he is going way over the top, which seems to be what he does lately, Depp is always fun to watch.

The problem is that he steps all over Hammer, who is a more-than-capable actor (he was the best thing about “J. Edgar” and a lot of fun in “Mirror Mirror”) but not nearly as magnetic as Depp. Yet the name of the film is “The Long Ranger,” not “Tonto.” There is a push and pull for not just our attention, but for the heart of the film.

Then there is the finale, a two-train action sequence that gets bigger and bigger (and, concurrently, less and less realistic) as it goes on. And on. And on.

Bigger is not always better, and “The Lone Ranger” is a prime example of this. Making this movie from Tonto’s perspective is an intriguing idea. It’s too bad its execution gets so muddled along the way.

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